Art · 21st century
born 1957 · Chinese
Conceptual art and activism
Ai Weiwei is the best-known Chinese artist alive and the most prominent critic of his own government. He smashes Han dynasty urns, carpets galleries with handmade porcelain seeds, builds monuments from the wreckage of an earthquake, and treats his own surveillance, beating and 81-day detention as material. He has worked in exile from Europe since 2015.
A hundred million porcelain husks, each moulded, fired and hand-painted in Jingdezhen, poured across a former power station's hall (2010)
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London
Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds); visitors were soon barred from walking on it because of ceramic dust
Image: Photograph by Mike Peel ( www.mikepeel.net ). · CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Three photographs of the artist letting a two-thousand-year-old ceremonial vessel fall and shatter (1995)
Various collections
Endlessly parodied, and itself re-enacted by a visitor who smashed one of his painted urns in Miami in 2014
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Twelve bronze animal heads reimagining the fountain-clock looted from the Old Summer Palace in 1860 (2010)
Touring; versions in numerous public collections
The original heads were taken from the Yuanmingyuan by Anglo-French troops
Image: Amanda Slater from Coventry, West Midlands, UK · CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
A lattice of steel around a Beijing arena, designed with a Swiss firm for the 2008 Olympics and later disowned by its Chinese collaborator (2008)
Beijing, China
The Bird's Nest, with Herzog & de Meuron; he refused to attend the opening ceremony
Image: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas · CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
Ninety tonnes of reinforcing bar salvaged from collapsed schools and hammered straight again, laid out in a fault-line ripple (2012)
Various collections and exhibitions
Straight, made after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A façade covered with nine thousand children's backpacks spelling out a bereaved mother's words in Chinese (2009)
Haus der Kunst, Munich (temporary)
'She lived happily for seven years in this world' — a mother of a child killed in the Sichuan earthquake
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia